Semantic Web

News

[7.3.13] The exam has been graded, grades can be found in ILIAS. If you want to see your exam, come to my office on Wednesday 13th between 2 and 3 PM. You can collect the certificates from end of next week on.

[08.11.12] Course will not take place on December 13th, instead the practice session is moved to December 20th.

[17.08.12] Course starts on October 18th.

Schedule and Resources

Resources (slides, examples and exercises) will be made available in ILIAS.

The column "Chapters" refers to the chapters in the basic book (listed below) that discuss the class topic. It may be useful to read the corresponding chapter in one of the books to better understand the course content.
More specific literature, links and tools for some topics can be found in the column "More references". More references will be added during the course, also all the basic books contain a lot of references. This is not required to pass the course, but may be interesting background reading for those interested.

Course Content

The Semantic Web is an initiative to make information in the web accessible to machines. In the first part of the course, basic concepts and technologies of the Semantic Web will be introduced (XML, XMLSchema, RDF, RDFS). The second part focuses on ontologies, OWL for describing ontologies, ontology engineering, reasoning with ontologies, and querying ontologies with SPARQL. In the third part, some applications and research topics inside the Semantic Web will be mentioned, e.g., semantic search or ontology learning.
Apart from theoretical classes, the course will include practice sessions.

Organizational Information

The course is open for students of

M.Sc. Computational Linguistics as a part of the concentration "Statistical Natural Language Processing" or as an elective.

B.Sc. Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung as an elective in the "Wahlbereich F: Fortgeschrittene Themen der Maschinellen Sprachverarbeitung" as part of the module "Fortgeschrittene Methoden in der Maschinellen Sprachverarbeitung" together with another 2 SWS course.

Diplom Computerlinguistik as an elective in the Hauptstudium.

Diplom Informatik as part of the Nebenfach.

A basic understanding of predicate logic is helpful (to the extent that is taught in the basic class of logic in the first year of Diplom and Bachelor).

Exam-related Information

To get admitted to the exam, you will have to be present at all three practice sessions, and present at least one exercise in class ("Vorleistung").

For all students (except M.Sc. CL who take the course as part of the concentration StatNLP)
there will be a written exam,
your final grade for the course will be the grade you get in the exam.
The duration of the exam is 30 minutes.

M.Sc. CL students who take the course as part of the concentration StatNLP do not have
to do the written exam,
this course will be examined as part of the oral exam for the concentration.

The exam will be similar to the exercises done in the practice sessions plus a few more theoretical questions. You will be provided with a "cheat sheet" in case you need to write RDF, OWL or SPARQL, so that you do not need to memorize namespace URLs or the exact spelling of owl:equivalentProperty.

What you need to know from block 1:

The Semantic Web Vision: General vision and layer cake.
You need to be able to answer the question "what is the semantic web and how do we get there".

XML / XMLSchema: No details will be asked.

RDF / RDFS: All.
You need to understand the semantics behind all RDF/RDFS syntax elements.
You need to be able to convert sentences in natural language to Turtle or XML syntax.
You need to know the differences between XMLSchema, RDF and RDFS.

What you need to know from block 2:
Main focus of the exam!

Ontologies and OWL: All except Protege.
You need to understand the semantics behind all OWL syntax elements.
You need to be able to convert sentences in natural language to Turtle or XML syntax.
You need to know the differences between RDF/S and OWL.

Ontology Engineering: All.
You don't need to know all the points by heart, but be prepared for a question like "what is a typical problem" or "how do you treat non-binary relations".

Reasoning: All except Protege.
You need to be able to read and write DL syntax.
You don't need to know how to convert something to conjunctive normal form.
You need to understand how Tableau works and what we want to do with it.
You need to be able to apply Tableau to a knowledge base to see if it is satisfyable.

What you need to know from block 3:

SPARQL: All.
You need to know how SPARQL works.
You need to be able to write SPARQL queries using all introduced language elements (UNION, OPTIONAL, FILTER).

Semantic Web Agents and Web of Trust: Main idea.
You need to be able to describe a Semantic Web Agent.
You need to know what digital signatures and encryption is for.

Semantic Search: Main idea.
You need to know what query expansion is.
You need to know what entity-centric search is.